Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery

R O N S M I T H Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery December: Richmond, Virginia Nothing’s changed here since you and I climbed the sagging chain link and honeysuckle off Cherry St. to sprint the steep hills of the dead. We knew what we wanted: granite thighs for trampling linemen, legs that could launch us over the caged faces to break the plane between us and gold figures we envisioned marching across our mantels; women whose red lips glistened and parted for everything we could give them. Coach ordered hills so we ran here in a pumping race to this crest where we stomped two presidents with our breakdown drills, where this stained woman still bends a face I will never see into her metal hands. Neither falling behind, we took each other on a tour of lies, past the white slab where you laid Sandy and showed your ass to a screaming widow who lashed you bloody with a dozen roses while you by God went on and finished, past the filth-eyed angels drooping with sorrow, shrouded obelisks 158 ❚ The 1980s and artfully broken columns, sandstone tree trunks carved intricate with rot, the gothic Randolph tomb where I crowbarred the bronze one August afternoon on Laura’s dare, where the west window broke the darkness into colors over her shivers, and she laid back, the Virgin’s blue cloak across her scar and my chest war painted, and she said, I’m safe, and I didn’t believe her and spilled my seed in Randolph’s deep-carved name. Which were the lies? Was the heavy door already open? Did I really pour myself into that gray stone? In the locker room your skinny ass never had a scratch that I remember. And what do we have now? Your Saturday headlines have shrunk to one small name in black marble not far from Lincoln’s huge, tired eyes in that other capital we cursed with our simple history. Alone in Vermont ice I’ve tried to chase it all down, pound some sense into it, like the time I bloodied knuckles on Jeff Davis’ cold jaw and then on you because you thought my whiskey meanness was Yankee sacrilege. In the blinding light at breakfast we blamed our bloody shirts and fist-changed faces on the Church Hill boys. Since then I’ve run more miles than you ever ventured from home, even for that jungle assault when you came up vapor just before your first R&R. They went back and back The 1980s ❚ 159 for a week after pushing past that blasted clearing. Nothing, not a dog tag, not a silver filling. In the only letter you ever finished you wrote of another city you never laid eyes on, dreamed of yellow-faced women waiting to set you on fire with American diseases. Today, lean for distance, I have circled all the unchanging dead with only a little chest burn, chasing my breath up and down every hill I could find. The pencil-necked guard who scared us away in ’65 is white-headed now, and almost fat. He still chains the gate at sundown. As early gold takes the Confederate pyramid and every plinth and angel, a couple, arm in arm, is walking on the flaming river far below. I turn back for the granite arch while there is still time. 160 ❚ The 1980s ...